These are some screengrabs from a video of me doing a skateboard trick I learned recently. It's not a particularly impressive trick, it's just something I hadn't learned in the twenty years prior. When I sent the video to a friend he said that I was 'making it look easy'.
And the reason he said that was that my arms were very low and close to my body the entire time.
Skateboarding is a perilous activity where you are constantly searching for balance, so mostly you instinctively spread your arms out to find your balance, like a tightrope walker. Yet if you notice my posture, and especially the position of my arms, you'll see my arms are barely raised above my waist the entire time.
I've got a tendency to do things with very restrained movements, and if you think about it for a second, that is exactly what you don't want to do in any activity that involves balance.
This is a photograph of professional skateboarder Daan van der Linden, and he displays how you do want to position your body while skating. He has his arms wide open and up in the air, with his gaze firmly aimed to where he is going. This is a good and effective mechanism to control your balance.
Yet when I did my skateboard trick, I was effectively walking a tight-rope with the posture of a flaneur. If successful it can be said that this is 'making it look easy', but in reality I have a bit of a reputation of comedically tipping over more often and on simpler tricks than my peers. It can thus be said that generally speaking, skateboarding is an activity that favours large and rapid coordinated movements of the entire body over small inhibited movements of the extremities.
So, you might be wondering, what does this have to do with art?
In art, and particularly in painting, there is also a large difference in those who use restrained movements of wrists and fingers and those who employ larger movements of the arms. Naively this difference can be seen most easily in the existence of large paintings and small paintings.
In much of the common perception, a large painting equals a better painting. Many of the most famous artworks are also among the artists' largest works, like Rembrandt's Nightwatch and Picasso's Guernica. This is probably because art is priced by the meter and thus larger paintings are more expensive. And we all know expensive things are always of higher quality.
Yet in reality I know of very few painters whose work got better when they worked on a large scale.
Although the Nightwatch is Rembrandt's most famous work, it is a fairly unremarkable work in everything but its size.
If we compare a self-portrait from 1669 with a similarly sized section of the Nightwatch, then the quality difference in the brushstrokes is difficult to ignore.
Large paintings often lack detail and precision, quite simply because it's difficult to perform at a high level for a long amount of time. For example, the average speed of the current world-record for the 100 meter dash is 10,43 m/s, while for the marathon it is 5,84 m/s.
And while stamina is an obvious actor in why large paintings tend to be of lower quality, I also think that a more restrained movement in painting is a very clear indicator of skill. When you think of skilled people, do you see them making large, flailing movements, or do they make small, precise ones? This is also reflected in colloquial uses of 'brute force' versus skill and intelligence.
As I pointed out at the beginning of this post, I'm a person who is very restrained in his movements. I believe this is reflected in the kinds of work I make, but also in the kinds of work I like to see. Much of large scale painting quite frankly has always looked brute and unsophisticated to me and very likely this is because I don't relate, on a personal level, to the the large movements they require. I myself don't move about that way in the world, so it's unappealing to me when other people do.
When I think of other artists whose technical skill I admire, they all seem to work from the fingers, rather than the arm.
One of the most skilled painters I can think of is Wayne Thibaud. His work is also, usually, relatively small in size. Fortunately there is video footage of him at work available on the internet:
Notice how his brushwork is done with small movements of the wrists and fingers.
Contrast this with David Hockney, who is known for his large paintings. His movements are all from the arm. Even when drawing on a small iPad, he draws by holding his wrist straight and moving his arm.
Although there are minor differences in the methods of each artist, generally speaking movements of the fingers are associated with work on small details. And the work of Vija Celmins is probably as detailed as contemporary painting gets.
I also noticed that Jean-Michel Basquiat mostly paints with his wrist, which is interesting cause he tends to work on a large scale.
There is a quick back and forth movement you can only do with your wrist. To do this precisely with your lower arm, or even your full arm, is close to impossible. And because this style of painting technique magnifies a small movement into a larger one, it requires a lot of precision and muscle control, which isn't easy to imitate. This perhaps helps to explain the distinctiveness of his work, despite his many imitators.
The above footage is of Matt Connors at work. He's an artist with technical knowledge of paint and materials, but it's clear that the brushwork itself is almost unskilled. His brushwork is then done with the entire arm, with the hand itself barely moving. As these are large, relatively uncoordinated movements, anybody can learn how to make brushstrokes like this, which isn't necessarily true for the previously mentioned artists.
It's a shame there is not more material available on the physical movements that happen when artists apply paint. There is limited video footage and I've certainly never encountered any text on the subject. Yet it's the essential aspect where the artist quite literally creates the work.
I'm personally partial to restrained and precise movements, which tends to result in small, detailed work. Yet I'm also aware that as a person I move through the world in a much more minute manner than most. It is thus likely that many people don't relate to my way of doing, and instead prefer the more coarse doings of many others.
